00 FPS
20
40
60
80
100
120
140 FPS
* GPU could not run all of the test due to insufficient VRAM
cards tend to not age quite so well. Even
if there aren’t driver issues, modern
games push the hardware in new and
demanding ways, and sometimes older
GPUs simply fall flat on their faces. But if
you’re just trying to play Fortnite or other
less demanding games and you’re willing
to drop the settings and resolution, even
relatively ancient hardware can still get
the job done—assuming you didn’t kill the
GPU with crypto mining, naturally.
GAMING PERFORMANCE OVER TIME
You won’t be shocked to see a clear trend
of improving performance through the
generations of hardware. Today’s RTX
3090 Ti basically doubles the performance
of the GTX 1080 Ti, and the same goes for
the RX 6900 XT and the two-generation
old RX Vega 64. Go back another
generation to the R9 Fury X and the GTX
980 Ti and the gap becomes even larger,
with modern high-end cards like the RTX
3080 and RX 6800 XT more than tripling
the performance of the fastest cards in
2015, the GTX 980 Ti, and R9 Fury X.
As impressive as that is, let’s keep
things in perspective. The fastest GPUs
in 2015 packed 8 billion transistors into
a 601mm^2 die size, the GM200 used in the
GTX 980 Ti. Today’s GA102 that powers the
RTX 3090 Ti sports a whopping 28.3 billion
transistors—3.5 times as many—in a chip
measuring 628mm^2. Clock speeds have
improved from 1.2GHz in 2015 to nearly
2GHz for Nvidia on the RTX 30-series,
while AMD has boosted clocks from over
1GHz on the R9 Fury X to over 2.5GHz on
the fastest RX 6000-series GPUs.
In other words, looking at transistor
counts and clock speeds, GPUs haven’t
even managed to achieve linear scaling.
We have larger chips, with lots more
transistors, running substantially higher
clocks, but performance has started to
taper off. On the other hand, today’s chips
do a lot more than those of six years ago,
with features like ray tracing and DLSS.
Another way of looking at it is to focus
on a specific level of GPU, like Nvidia’s
980, 1080, 2080, and 3080. Here’s where
the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard
scaling become more obvious. The 1080
boosts performance by 84 percent over
the 980, the 2080 is 55 percent faster than
RX 6000-SERIES
RX 6500 XT*
RX 6600
RX 6600 XT
RX 6700 XT
RX 6800
RX 6800 XT
RX 6900 XT
RTX 20-SERIES
RTX 2060
RTX 2060 Super
RTX 2070
RTX 2070 Super
RTX 2080
RTX 2080 Super
RTX 2080 Ti
Titan RTX
RTX 30-SERIES
RTX 3050
RTX 3060
RTX 3060 Ti
RTX 3070
RTX 3070 Ti
RTX 3080 Ti
RTX 3080 12GB
RTX 3080 Ti
RTX 3090
RTX 3090 Ti
Only Nvidia RTX cards and AMD
RX 6000 GPUs can run our full
ray tracing test suite.
GPU STATE OF PLAY
RAY TRACING PERFORMANCE AT 1080P MEDIUM (FPS)
As with cars, putting the
wrong driver at the wheel
can be a recipe for disaster
with graphics cards.
state of the GPUnion address
30 MAXIMU MPC JUN 2022
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